86 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



"Bell first made the experiment in 1S1 1 while Magendie con- 

 firmed and extended it ten years later," whereas the truth of the 

 matter is that Magendie was the real and sole author both of 

 the experiment and of its interpretation. The Bell faction 

 of that day went indeed further than this. At the Cambridge 

 meeting of the British Association in 1833 the statement was 

 made and accepted unchallenged that " the honour of this 

 discovery, doubtless the most important accession to physio- 

 logical knowledge since the time of Harvey, belongs exclusively 

 to Sir Charles Bell." More recently still we have Sir Charles 

 Bell's successor at the College of Surgeons — Prof. Keith — 

 making the staggering assertion that " nothing can be clearer 

 than Bell's title to the discovery that the anterior root is motor 

 and the posterior sensory," because Bell says that " the anterior 

 root is sensitive and the posterior root insensitive. 1 This surely 

 is the ne plus ultra of the Bell fable ; it is time to pull up and 

 to realise the meaning of cold print. 



From now onwards until the end of his life Bell harps 

 upon Magendie's discovery as his ; the 5th nerve as " the spinal 

 nerve of the head " soon becomes his principal war-horse. The 

 extraordinary feature of Bell's scientific career is that from 

 1824 to 1844, in the numerous papers on the nervous system that 

 he published during that period, he never made any experiment 

 nor stated any new fact. Every one of these papers, whatever 

 its subject, contains, however, a repetition of his first false claim 

 to Magendie's discovery in one form or another — generally as 

 an allusion to something taken for granted. And where it is 

 not Bell who speaks, it is Alexander Shaw, either in his own 

 name or as "a pupil." 



It was during 1823 that Bell prepared his case. In that 

 year he published two papers on the Eye in the PJiilosophical 

 Transactions, the first part on March 20, the second on June 19. 

 In the second, at pp. 306-7, he attacks Magendie, condemning 

 experiments and appealing to his pupils to keep to the examples 

 of our own great countrymen. This is what he writes in the 

 Philosophical Transactions, p. 302 : 



'Anatomy is already looked upon with prejudice by the 

 thoughtless and ignorant : let not its professors unnecessarily 

 incur the censures of the humane. Experiments have never 

 been the means of discovery; and a survey of what has been 



1 The Lancet, March 18, 191 1, p. 765. 



